Curtis Roberts, 19, is an FCPS senior who is trying something new. Roberts, who has autism, attends Cedar Lane School in Vienna, which provides smaller class settings for students who require additional support. He’s also now an intern at Brooke Rental Center in Vienna, a family-owned small business that offers customers anything from banquet chairs and outdoor tents to chandeliers and street lamps for parties.

Aida Roberts, Curtis’ mom, says she wanted to be sure that Curtis obtained work experience as he got closer to aging out of school. For some students with special needs, however, a usual teenage after-school job can be trickier to navigate successfully.

Cedar Lane offers employment assistance programs for teens at their school, at least 80 of whom have worked through partnerships the school has created with local businesses including Dollar Tree, Panera Bread, Pet Spaw Grooming Salon, Alya Salon, and the Vienna Community Center. The students work as unpaid interns, monitored by school staff, while picking up real-world skills for successful employment.
 

“Before this program, Curtis was always with a small group of students, going everywhere with them,” his mother Aida says. “I said, ‘Let’s try to put him somewhere on his own,’ and here we are. He helps clean up chairs after customers return them from party rentals, stack chairs, and assemble things that people want to rent. I notice he is growing and becoming more independent.”

Three years ago, in the throes of the pandemic, Brooke Rental Center — like many other small businesses — was hurting for reliable employees. When Anna Veltri, an FCPS employment and transition representative, knocked on Brooke’s door and asked them to take a chance on hiring Cedar Lane students as interns, owner Jim Brooke figured it was worth a shot.

“I thought it was an interesting idea,” Brooke said. “It had been hard to get employees, so we will see how this works, maybe this will even help us.”

He had no idea how well it would work: the first Cedar Lane student he brought on, Damien Lloyd, is now a full-time employee.

“Damien stays busy the entire time, I don’t even supervise him. He knows exactly what he needs to do, comes in, and gets busy right away,” Brooke says. “Almost any task you ask him to do, he takes pride in it — he ensures he does it well. He adds value to our store.”

Much of Damien’s work, at first, was helping to organize and maintain rental items, and repairing and repainting furniture when it got damaged or chipped.

Damien, however, quickly went beyond that role. Damien started dabbling in office work by ensuring customer bills were mailed out in a timely fashion. Then, he started tinkering with chandeliers the shop rents out to customers.

“We had no idea and all of a sudden we see he can rewire chandeliers, complicated ones with nine different arms or streetlights like Victorian street lamps that we have in the shop. He rewires and fixes them,” Brooke said. “He had a skill we didn’t know about that he had learned from his family so now he has taken on rewiring work for us as well.”
 

Damien’s newest role includes supervising the Cedar Lane students who followed him, like Curtis. Some of that includes casual, almost big brotherly pointers, according to Curtis’ mom.

“Curtis likes to talk about roller coasters and combustion vehicles. A lot. Damien is teaching him that it’s not appropriate to talk about those topics with customers on the job when they come in looking for party equipment to rent,” Aida Roberts says. 
 

And Curtis is learning life skills too, she says.

 “Curtis is seeing how important it is to ask for things or to ask someone to show him how to do things — just like anybody has to figure out in a new job,” Aida says.

Getting students out of their comfort zone and into real-world situations where they can acquire professional skills is the main goal of the program, Veltri says.  
 

“A lot of our students are nervous about the idea of employment and even thinking about their future,” Veltri says. FCPS staffers meet students on the job to provide feedback on their work that can be addressed at the school, whether it’s time management skills or how to work with others.

“We want them to build soft transferable work skills that will help them be successful in any paid job,” she says. “It is an opportunity for students to see a lot of success, and open their eyes to talking and thinking about their futures.”

Damien, the student intern-turned-full-time employee, feels a sense of pride too.

“I like being a mentor now because I used to be an intern myself,” he said. “I am from Cedar Lane, so I knew I could help other kids out.”